(Page 2 of 26) - Constructing the Long Term: The Positive Case in Climate Policy and other Long Crises authored by Princen, Thomas.

Princen: Long term, ISA2007

2/27/2007

Constructing the Long Term:
The Positive Case in Climate Policy and other Long Crises

Introduction

The long term is a defining characteristic of sustainability. Other goals may have an implicit
long-term element, but they are not defining. Scholars and lay alike consider constitutional
democracy an ideal form of government, one to be fought for, negotiated, and enshrined in
institutions of law and administration. As such, it is not a transitional form of government, not
one to be disposed of once the ideal has been reached, as was the case with communism or many
military dictatorships. Economists and business leaders consider economic growth as a goal that
aims to generate wealth now and for the future because today’s wealth is the basis for accruing
future wealth. Leaders seek peace for the present and foreseeable future, not as a temporary
measure, not as an interregnum between hostilities, but as a permanent state of affairs.

In all these goals—democracy, growth, peace—the long term element is thin; it merely

follows from the very desirability of the goal itself: since peace is a good thing, obviously we
want it all the time. In sustainability, the long term element must be thick, it must stand out, bold
and explicit, constantly debated and negotiated to be sure, but prominent and defining.

In part

this is because the sustainability goal has arisen at a historical juncture (roughly the 1980s to the
present) where so much decision making is short term. A primary reason is the ever-increasing
penetration of the market where more and more of life, especially everyday life, is commodified
and where the externalization of costs, the distancing of commerce, all informed by modern
economics, a form of reasoning inherently short term, even atemporal prevails. Another reason is
the degeneration of electoral politics, especially in the U.S., where money and the imperatives of
fundraising speak louder than the needs of the elderly, children, the uninsured, the mentally ill,
the disaster prone.

But the larger reason for developing a thick notion of the long term is the state of the

environment, both the biophysical environment, that is, the material underpinnings of all
economies, and the social environment, the relations among people and between people and the
natural world. The strain on these dimensions are well documented, and the trends are rarely
positive. Yet for many, that is, those who can buy their way out of the consequences of
environmental degradation (for now), things look good. For them, roughly a fifth of the world’s
population, concentrated in the North and in capital cities of the South, the challenges of life are
indeed short term; the future, as always, will take care of itself. The trends speak otherwise,
however, for rich and poor alike: no one escapes climate change or persistent toxics or the
consequences of depleted soils.

The challenge of so constructing a “thick” long term rests on a central dilemma in the

global environmental problematic: the incidence and scope of cause-effect time lags and
consequent proliferation of risks is expanding at the same time that time scales of practice are
contracting (from the years and seasons of agrarians to the minutes and nanoseconds of
technologists, for instance). Overlaying this twin phenomenon is a pervasive belief that humans
are inherently short term, a belief buttressed by:

i. everyday experience (e.g., shopping as recreation and expression; throw-away product

design, packaging, and buildings for ; investing as gambling;

My call for the long term as a defining element of sustainability should not be confused with a claim that there is, or should be, a

single definition of sustainability. As Jack Manno points out (personal communication, February 2007), the goal of sustainability, like

other major societal goals such as democracy, or I would add, peace, are best “defined” by what they are not. So, as I have elaborated
elsewhere, sustainability is not mining or environmental improvement. See Thomas Princen, The Logic of Sufficiency (Cambridge,

Mass: MIT Press, 2005), pp. 29-32.

In fact, the consequences of environmental degradation are felt in the near term by the poor while, for the rich, they are largely felt in

the far term. Manno, personal communication, February, 2007.